Thread by @KirkegaardEmil

New paper out!

The Negative Religiousness-IQ Nexus is a Jensen Effect on Individual-Level Data: A Refutation of Dutton et al.’s ‘The Myth of the Stupid Believer’

PDF is on RG in link

bit.ly/3rHgNdS

We show that prior negative results are due to toward-0 bias from Jensen's method when used with small gaps and small sample sizes (unreliability of the gap vectors).

We use data from the awesome Vietnam Experience Study (VES) which has 19 cognitive tests, and all the MMPI-2 items, many of which ask about religious matters.

Factor analyzing the religious items yields a kind of semi-continuous religiousness latent variable. This is related to intelligence at -0.20 ish.

Using our battery of tests, we find the usual strong Jensen pattern.

Regression analysis does not show any obvious confounding with age, race, or even education and income. Effect of intelligence seems pretty direct.

We go further. We have access to some 200 items too, and these also show the Jensen pattern. Note the outliers! The one item that is way out of place is WAIS Information 18, which in fact asks about contents of the Bible. Religious people get it right a lot more often.

Finally, we find that the various indicators of religiousness show quite different associations to intelligence. It is mainly the belief-related indicators that relate, not behaviors. This is also true when controls are added.

Paper with @jollyheretic, kudos for the funny title of refuting his own prior paper from last year. 😎